Beyond the Pleasure Principle

The essay in which Freud revised his theory of the drives. He starts from facts the pleasure principle does not account for: the dreams of the traumatic neuroses, including the war neuroses, which keep returning the patient to the accident; a small child’s game of throwing away a reel so that it is “gone” (fort) and pulling it back with a joyful “there” (da); and the patient in analysis who, instead of remembering the repressed, repeats it in the transference. From these he infers a compulsion to repeat that seems more original, more elementary and more drive-like than the pleasure principle. Trauma is described as excitation strong enough to break through the mind’s protective shield against stimuli, leaving it the task of binding the incoming quantities. Freud then proposes that the drives are conservative, striving to restore an earlier state, so that “the aim of all life is death”, and he sets death drives against the life or sexual drives, the libido he identifies with the Eros of the poets and philosophers. Biological findings on natural death and on the immortality of protists neither confirm nor remove the hypothesis, and he holds to the distinction between death drives and life drives, adding that the pleasure principle seems to serve the death drives. A footnote acknowledges that Sabina Spielrein had anticipated a good part of this speculation.